Introduction to Facebook Insights

This introduction to Facebook Insights explains the key terms used and how to interpret the statistics produced by Facebook Insights. If you are new to Facebook or an experienced user, it is important to analyse the activity on your page and Facebook Insights provides the necessary metrics to analyse this activity and improve your page engagement and reach.

What metrics are available to measure the overall performance of my Page in Facebook Insights?

Three metrics at the top of the Overview tab in your Page Insights help you assess the size and level of engagement of your audience. (Facebook 2014)

Page Likes: Total Page Likes is the number of unique people who like your Page. New Page likes shows the number of new likes your Page received during the last 7 days, compared with the previous 7-day period.

Post Reach: Total Reach is the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your Page (including any ads) during the last 7 days. Post Reach is the number of unique people who have seen your Page posts.

Engagement: People Engaged is the number of unique people who have clicked on, liked, commented on or shared your posts during the last 7 days. Likes, comments, shares and post clicks show the totals for these actions during the last 7 days.

What's the difference between impressions and reach?

Impressions are the number of times a post from your Page is displayed, whether the post is clicked or not. People may see multiple impressions of the same post. For example, someone might see a Page update in News Feed once, and then a second time if their friend shares it.

Reach is the number of unique people who received impressions of a Page post. Reach might be less than impressions since one person can see multiple impressions. (Facebook 2014)

A note about the People Talking About This (PTAT) metric

Facebook has recently starting upgrading its metrics to make them more meaningful:

People Talking About This (PTAT)

We heard from many Page admins that they want more insight into the actions that make up PTAT. For instance, how people's liking their business Page differs from people's interacting with their posts. For this reason, we're breaking out PTAT into elements that will now be reported separately as Page Likes, People Engaged (the number of unique people who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared your posts), Page tags and mentions, Page checkins, and other interactions on a Page. PTAT as a combined metric will still be available for Page admins not participating in the new Insights preview. (Facebook 2013)

We would recommend using the reach and engagement metrics discussed below.

Understanding Reach and Engagement?

So we now know what the terms Reach and Engagement are, now we need to understand how to interpret them.

Reach indicates how successful your page is at getting your message out and into your followers' news feed. This provides a good indication of how well you are building your audience on Facebook.

Engagement indicates how many users engage with your post via sharing, clicks, likes and comments. A high reach for a post doesn't necessarily mean high engagement.

For long term success, you should aim to build your reach and engagement. By reviewing your Facebook insights metrics regularly you can learn what type of content engages your audience.

The diagram below shows an extract from the Ki Federation of Great Britain Facebook page. The most successful post content relates to Federation events, photos of events, Federation clubs and members achievements. The more general posts are less successful.

The post clicks indicates how many users clicked on the post and were referred back to the website. If you have Google Analytics enabled for your website, the referral information will be available and enables you to track the triggers that make people view your website.

Understanding the type of content that engages your audience on Facebook can also help you decide what content should be included on your website. By combining the use of Facebook Insights and Google Analyics you can learn the types of content that engages your audience leading to greater activity on both your website and Facebook page.

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